This year’s regatta includes about 2,000 athletes and likely 800 to 1,500 spectators in the stands. There will also be a livestream.
The 27th annual Knecht Cup Regatta will again be hosted at Cooper River beginning on Wednesday and Thursday to start off the collegiate rowing season.
Regatta director Laura Knecht Blanche is the daughter of William Knecht, who established Cooper River as a rowing course in the late 1960s. She’s continuing her father’s legacy by hosting the regatta.
“It was an honor for me to take over hosting this event, because it’s a way for me to celebrate my father and his love of the sport and his dream to promote the sport right on the river that he established and created there in Cherry Hill,” she explained.
“So it’s very exciting.”
The spring season for rowing starts in March and ends in May, with the Cooper River’s timing having its own significance.
“It’s the first regatta of the season” Blanche explained, “that these college teams can really get a feel for the athletes, the racing … how they measure up to the rest of the teams and what they may need to work on to improve between the start of the season and the end of the season.”
This year’s Knecht Cup will include about 2,000 athletes and an expected crowd of about 800 to 1,500 spectators in the stands. Its livestream draws about 20,000 viewers.
Players are coming from 17 states and Washington, D.C., representing colleges like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Temple University and Georgetown University. Of the 65 announced schools, four are in New Jersey, compared with 16 in Pennsylvania, the most of any state.
Blanche joined the regatta as director in 2019 and took over from Jack St. Clair, who headed the event for 20 years beginning in 1999. Blanche predicts this year will be the largest regatta of which she’s been a part. Improvements are made each year and hers include streamlining the registration process; creating a website; and, for this year, having U.S. Rowing, the national governing body for the sport, on hand to host panels on Saturday and Sunday.
They will include discussions about how kids can stay involved in rowing after college, mental focus, a rowing history, Olympians on the livestream and interviews and signings with national team members.
Blanche noted that rowing has only grown in popularity.
” … It’s an exciting thing for me to see,” she acknowledged. “There’s a lot more work to be done to promote the sport overall and make it more accessible. It’s always been a very expensive, niche sport, so I’m hoping that we can continue to work on that to allow some more people to get involved in the future.”
As for that accessibility, Blanche explained that U.S. Rowing has some programs, but as a Morristown resident, she doesn’t see rowing clubs in her area because it lacks nearby rivers and the cost of running a club can be prohibitive.
” … South Jersey, there in Cooper and in Philadelphia, there are many opportunities to get involved,” she explained. “But even then, it’s quite expensive, so that can eliminate a number of kids that would otherwise get involved. So the truth is, that’s what I observe and what I hope will change.
“And I’ll put it on my list of things to work on as well.”
